Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times has published an article about the 65,000 new streetlights now illuminating the streets of Detroit. This seemingly prosaic infrastructural adjustment actually has a lot of import. For a long time, according to the article, Detroit’s decline was... View full entry

In ways big and small, architects like Mr. Berman have changed New York City this year. Projects like the library branch made it a little more livable and humane.

What follows is nothing nearly as disciplined or logical as a list of 2016’s architectural highs and lows in town. It’s more a kind of belated thank you note for a few projects that kept faith with architecture’s ideals and the city’s better self.
— nytimes.com

Last week we witnessed the loss of Dame Zaha Hadid, one of architecture's most formidable and prolific talents. We'll be devoting a later podcast episode to remembering her and honoring her work. Until then, we'll continue catching you up with the most significant architecture news from the past... View full entry

Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. [...]

I don’t think it’s coincidental that early in 2011 the Egyptian revolution centered around Tahrir Square, or that the Occupy Movement later that same year, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, expressed itself by taking over squares like Taksim in Istanbul, the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.
— nybooks.com

Related stories in the Archinect news:The Art of Architecture Criticism: Archinect Sessions One-to-One #7 with Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York TimesMichael Kimmelman in praise of NYC's new garage-and-salt-shed complex: "Best examples of new public architecture in the... View full entry

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times, joins me for our first One-to-One interview of 2016. I wanted to talk with Kimmelman specifically about a piece he had published just at the end of last year, called “Dear Architects: Sound Matters”. The piece considers how an... View full entry

we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy. [...]

Sound may be invisible or only unconsciously perceived, but that doesn’t make it any less an architectural material than wood, glass, concrete, stone or light. [...]

Acoustics can act in deep, visceral ways, not unlike music ... And while it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly how, there is often a correlation between the function of a place or an object and the sound we expect it to make.
— nytimes.com

After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. [...] The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.
— nytimes.com

In a fifty-one minute conversation with New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, Bjarke Ingels does little to dispel his reputation as a media-friendly starchitect who dances his way around thorny design issues by reminding everyone of the rose. When Kimmelman brings up the wind issues that an... View full entry

Michael Kimmelman’s column this week, about the debate over plans to demolish a midcentury Paul Rudolph building in Goshen, N.Y., makes the case for why it should be saved. It is only one example of his taking up a cause. As The Times’s architecture critic, he has not been shy about advocacy.

Here, he describes why he’s been outspoken in supporting this building, which doesn’t have the profile of other fights he has taken up.
— nytimes.com

UPDATE: Orange County legislators fail to save Paul Rudolph's Government CenterPreviously:Future of Paul Rudolph's brutalist Orange County building still uncertainPaul Rudolph's brutalist Orange County gem to be repurposed as "arts hub"Rethinking a Spurned LandmarkGwathmey Siegel's Kaufman wants... View full entry

For the latest Student Works: Amelia featured Cellular Tessellation, a pavilion done as a "collaborative research effort among students from Bond University, University of Technology Sydney, University of South Wales, and University of Sydney" for the Sydney Vivid Light festival of 2014. Plus... View full entry

“It’s not so bad,” offered an architect who has a window facing the building.

Alas, it is.

Like the corporate campus and plaza it shares, 1 World Trade speaks volumes about political opportunism, outmoded thinking and upside-down urban priorities. It’s what happens when a commercial developer is pretty much handed the keys to the castle.
— The New York Times

The power of architecture at work in the modern city was a theme that emerged from the start at last Thursday night’s Big Ideas, Bold Thinkers, Brilliant Dialogue series at Pratt Institute. This particular conversation featured New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and Architect... View full entry

MAS is proud to announce that Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, has been named the winner of the 2014 Brendan Gill Prize. [...]

The jury singled out Kimmelman’s exceptional coverage of the challenges posed by an overstressed Penn Station, challenging New Yorkers and their regional neighbors to no longer settle for anything less than planning and design excellence that befits the busiest transportation hub in North America.
— The Municipal Art Society of New York

That the Antinori family embraced a more ambitious project, allowed Archea to design everything down to the furniture and fittings, then paid the bills after the budget more than doubled from its original $45 million, and also endured years of delays because of construction problems, shows how much fine, successful architecture depends on the right client.
— New York Times

It might seem like a mismatch: the Dolans, veterans of many public brawls, against Kimmelman, an urbane trained pianist who previously wrote primarily about art. But such is the power of the Times when it’s given to a crusading voice.
— NY Magazine